Students Honor Allen Matusow With Award

Students Honor Allen Matusow With Award

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

Rice News Staff
May 13, 1999

A knock at the office door of Allen Matusow, the 1999 recipient of the Nicolas Salgo Distinguished Teaching Award, interrupted the history professor’s comments on why he likes to teach.

He opened the door to a student, who wanted to know if he had completed her paper. He had. But a search of his desk and the papers that circled his chair as though a dust devil had passed through the room failed to produce anything. The missing paper was somewhere in the room, but the search would have to continue later that afternoon. He could find her grade though.

While he clicked through his software windows, a visitor asked the student why she thought Matusow received the Salgo award.

“He loves what he does,” she said without hesitation.

Then Matusow found her grade–A. He smiled. She smiled, handed him a sheaf of papers and said, “Here are the Geneva protocols I told you about.”

As he took the papers, Matusow turned to his visitor and pointed out the lesson to be learned, “See, you learn things.”

Created in 1966, the Salgo award was the first teaching award established at Rice. The Noren-Salgo Foundation and Rice fund the award. The current junior and senior class bestow the Salgo award upon one faculty member, who also receives a $1,500 prize. The Salgo can only go to the same faculty member twice, and there must be at least seven years between awards.

Matusow, the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History, has taught at Rice for 36 years. He has swept through all the Brown teaching awards and won so many times that he is no longer eligible.

“They retired my jersey,” he said.

“I appreciate that the students thought the courses I gave them were worthwhile,” he said.

Matusow, who served as dean of humanities at Rice from 1981 to 1995, said teaching awards serve to recognize an unsung skill of faculty. There seems to be little doubt that Matusow is a gifted teacher.

“When students talk about him in the Colleges–and they do so with some regularity, they speak in reverential tones, as if he possessed some sort of mystical power, some magical pedagogical gift,” said Richard Smith, professor of history and a long-time colleague of Matusow.

Alan Grob, professor of English, said Matusow has an “almost priestly” approach to teaching history.

Both Grob and Smith spoke highly of Matusow’s scholarship.

Matusow, the author of “Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars and Votes” (University Press of Kansas, 1998), loves writing.

“I like to write,” he said. “When you’re writing–it’s your craft. You’re creating something.”

Writing is an important part of his teaching, because it fosters critical thinking. In addition to his classes on aspects of 20th century U.S. history, he also offers an intensive writing seminar limited to 15 students.

Matusow credits his teaching success in part to the subject of U.S. history around which he can weave a narrative and in which he can embed his analysis.

Matusow prefers not to talk in depth about his teaching style. His strength, he said, is that he works hard. His weakness is his inability to run a discussion group as he would like.

“In my view, the factors that contribute to Allen’s effectiveness as a teacher also explain his success as a scholar: careful preparation, artful intelligence, great gifts of language, a clever and critical mind, and a relentlessly provocative way of posing questions,” Smith said. “He loves to challenge conventional wisdom, and he also enjoys digging deeply into important issues, encouraging his students to do the same.”